He's expressing concern that you and your unbiased assistants will fiddle with the vote totals and people won't be able to verify because the totals are secret. You know, that thing other people have raised concerns about.

IQ didn't exist when the 2016 awards were held, so suggesting that we stacked the 2017 awards in retribution for the previous year is baseless. In fact, in December 2016 (cuz, remember, IQ formed in March 2017) BK, what eventually became Zodiac and CS were still in Syndi-OO, so we didn't have any particular ax to grind regarding how that year's voting went. And, just like I told you last year when you contacted me in DMs to complain about the IQ turnout, people voting doesn't 'spoil' the process, it enriches it, since the whole point should be encourage as much participation as possible. That's the point of a democratic poll after all 😛
Nah, as CS's legal successor we co-opted that award along with their members. You guys can try for it this year though.

If there's no concern about the vote being rigged (or past votes having been rigged), why make the vote secret instead of public? In previous votes you couldn't see who voted for who, so how people voted was already private - it was just the totals that were open to public scrutiny. All you're doing by refusing to share those totals is undermining confidence in the vote, since reasonable people are going to wonder why you feel the need to hide votes totals in the first place. And while it's nice that multiple people are confirming the totals, there's still no reason why the vote distribution shouldn't be available for anyone to see, since the most plausible reason to hide it would be to tweak it toward a preferred outcome. So yeah, go ahead and do your radio awards (although that's kind of dumb since people that aren't close to your timezone are going to miss out), but don't undermine confidence in the voting process just so more people will tune into your show.

IQ doesn't have any tie of any kind with anyone involved in the war, so where did options 1 to 3 even come from? We don't really have a stake in the outcome of this fight, so it's kind of random to assume we'd intervene on either side.

I mean it's TKRs fault they managed to 1) alienate the majority of Orbis to the point that a coalition that outnumbers their sphere 4:1 has come together to roll them (although given their concentration in the upper tier those numbers are a bit deceptive, since the numbers are much more even up top) and 2) opted to lay there quietly and get stomped rather than adopting a strategy that might allow them to more effectively fight (and have some fun in the process). While it's nice you've returned from your absence to advocate a change in the game mechanics that would offset the many FA and Milcom blunders that have landed TKR in the situation it now finds itself in, the idea that the rules should be altered to ensure that TKR's curbstomp is more 'fun' for their members isn't exactly reasonable. They'd do better to look at the existing mechanics and see how spheres like IQ and KT/TGH have adapted to unfavourable political and military situations and see if there's anything they can apply from those situations to their own dilemma, rather than deploying you to the OWF to propose alterations to the rules because they're finally on the receiving end of the kind of war they've been prosecuting against others for the past year and a bit.

Or using some sort of strategy to clear a safe zone and push up and/or down. There's plenty of stuff you can do to equalize damage when you're conventionally outnumbered. It's not our fault certain AAs are just laying there getting rolled instead of, you know, adopting a strategy outside of their traditional comfort zone 😛

I mean that's based on the assumption that it's a good idea to store the majority of your bank in one or two nations, when recent history suggests it really isn't (see: the raid on tS's bank). If you have a large stockpile, it makes far more sense to store it in an AA, since that way you're not vulnerable to blockades and looting if your bank holder happens to get beiged. And, if Sketchy's proposal was accepted in its entirety as you seem to advocate, there would be a disparity between the penalties leveled on centralized AAs versus more decentralized ones, since AAs can't build the national projects to offset resource losses that nations can, making it the worst of both worlds for AAs that haven't traditionally kept the majority of their stockpiles in individual nations.

If the degradation rate is 30 per 100k without the project and 20 per 100k with the project, the degradation rate is 50 percent higher for those without the project (20 vs 30). You can also say it's 33 percent lower for those with the project (30 vs 20), but that's really a question of what angle you're coming at it from
As for the rest of the proposal, I have absolutely no issue with 3); I think it would go a long way to reducing the costs associated with war, particularly considering how easily tanks and ships die when pitted against the planes based strategies many AAs currently use. So reducing the steel input for units definitely makes a lot of sense and reducing gas and muni consumption more broadly would likely help as well. However, I don't really see how 1) would contribute to the goal of more frequent wars/less risk averse behaviour, since it's predicated on the assumption that AAs would fight more frequently to offset resource degradation, when the more likely outcome is they'd just take longer to achieve the same benchmarks that they feel enable them to fight. If the aim is simply to reduce the cooldown period between wars, reducing resource costs (and infra reconstruction costs if we wanted to take the concept to its logical conclusion) would achieve that goal on its own - attempting to 'penalize' AAs by continuously reducing their stockpiles is counterproductive, since it just means you have to take more time to get the resources you need to fight, regardless of whether overall consumption is reduced using 3) or not.

Yeah but assuming the second part of your proposal was adopted (the national project) in tandem with the first (resource degradation), the resource penalty would be 50 percent larger for centralized AAs, as compared to AAs that require their membership to maintain individual warchests, since there's no mechanic that allows, say, Space Rome to build a project to slow resource decay. This not only privileges one style of gameplay over another (which is problematic in itself), but it doesn't actually tackle the core issue, which is that it takes a prolonged period to save up resources to fight a large scale war. You're effectively proposing a mechanic that makes it harder, rather than easier, to stockpile the resources needed to fight, which won't do much to encourage more frequent conflicts.
I do like the bit about reducing resource costs though, since that would actually remove a barrier to fighting.

Yeah but the critique isn't so much about smaller, individual warchests, but rather larger scale AA ones. Scaling resource degradation effectively penalizes AAs that centrally manage member resource requirements (for example, by storing them in the AA bank) and will make it harder to save up the resources those AAs need to wage war. If the idea is to incentivize war this is the wrong way to go about it, since these AAs will have to save longer to accumulate the same amounts. If we want more frequent war, the most effective method would be to lesson the consumption of resources (as Sketchy suggested as the second part of his proposal), since that will reduce the amount of time it takes to accumulate what you need to fight. Making resources disappear over time (especially when stored in large amounts) will just make wars harder to sustain, which means they'll be less frequent, not more.

That, basically.
Resources degrading over time wouldn't lead most established AAs to be all 'welp, let's start a global war to use them before we lose them.' You're more likely to see AAs simply adjust their war timetables to reflect the fact it'll take even longer to hit warchest targets. If you want to reduce the costs associated with war, by all means reduce resource consumption, but resource degradation would simply lengthen the time it takes AAs to get together the resources necessary for a war and encourage further stagnation while we all wait for everyone to get their collective stockpiles together.

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Politics & War

Politics & War is a free to play browser based persistent massively multi-player online game where you create your own nation and rule it. Forced to make grueling political decisions you are truly in charge in Politics & War. Play together with friends and strangers, pit your armies against each other and wage war, or work together cooperatively for mutual prosperity. In Politics & War you call the shots.